1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to character/symbol generating devices, and more particularly to a character/symbol generating device capable of generating characters and symbols with a desired line thickness based on character/symbol data of the same font category but of different line thickness.
2. Description of the Related Art
Character/symbol generating devices encompass printers, display units and the like. As is well known in the art, characters of various kinds of font are generally usable in such devices. Typically, one font has several different families. Only line width or line thickness of segmental lines making up each character or symbol (for the sake of simplicity, referred to as "character" hereinafter) is different in the respective families of the same font. For example, a serif font like Times Roman and sans-serif font like Helvetica are of different kind. Times Roman can be classified into slender Times, normal Times and bold Times which are the families of Times Roman but the thickness of the line segments of the character in these families are different.
Conventionally, character/symbol generating devices are supplied with fonts of different families individually, so a large capacity memory is needed to load these font families. It is possible for the character/symbol generating devices to reduce the number of font families to be loaded by producing desired intermediate line thickness characters based on slender and bold characters using interpolation technique. Only the slender and bold character families suffice to load in the character/symbol generating devices, whereby characters of desired line thickness are generated.
However, there are problems in performing the interpolation technique in that arrangement order of pieces of data for the same character in slender and bold families must be fixedly determined in advance so that the corresponding points or parts of the two family characters can be identified from the order of the data arrangement. This is because different font families do not have intercommunicating information that identifies the corresponding points or parts of the different font family characters. Therefore, if it is attempted to produce additional fonts from the minimum number of family fonts, it is necessary to process separately developed family fonts and rearrange the order of pieces of data. If the arrangement order of the pieces of data provides an information when reconstructing the character, rearrangement of the order cannot be done.